A Glimpse of Saturn

It has been a long and cloudy week, the forecast became glum right after I ordered an auto-guider. The kind folks at the Telesscopes subreddit (reddit.com/r/telescopes) confirmed that my choices were adequate or fine. Listed in that post are the mounting bar by ADM - a few pieces of machined aluminum with a black anodizing coat along with alignment rings. From there we have an 80mm guide scope. Someone recommended I get an ST80 but I could only find a CT80. If I was more patient, I could have gotten a used ST80 - it was a nice enough scope with more metal than plastic. While shopping around I did stumble into a 120mm scope that was a bit more than double the price, but the sample images showed that it excelled for beginner astrophotography.


Further investigation will be warranted, it migth make a good "light configuration" main imaging scope for nights when I don't want to deal with the long focal length of the SCT. It could also make for a decent guide scope, although it would be considerably heavier. So many options to consider.. so much to defer thinking about.



For today's post, I have one photo to share. Perhaps later I shall share the predecessor images which lead me to this final image of Saturn.

Saturn after heave post-processing.

The image was captured though a "Celestron 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope on a Sky-Watcher EQ6-R Pro mount. It was captured on an Olympus Pen E-PL1 mirrorless camera body at prime focus. It started out as a two minute MP4 with an AVI extension and was then processed through registax. The key was the "wavelet" processing feature or filter. I only did two passes with most of the aggressive effort happening on the first pass. It was actually done by adapting a method which some guy used for processing Jupiter.

After having minor success processing Jupiter, I decided to do the same thing to the moon.

 Lunar surface seen through 2x barlow lens with Olympus Pen EPL-1 at prime focus.

At the level of magnification seen above, the waves were big. The image was far too dull to share with the world, but after a two pass wavelet process.. it's pretty acceptable. There is some blurriness at the left edge of the field, most of it was cropped out.

In short, the "lucky shot" method through which video is processed to get a still image works pretty well. In the near future I shall further detail how both of these images were accomplished. For weeks prior, my photos of Saturn and Jupiter had flat homogenized colors and were a bit blurry along the edges although still distinct. They lacked detail mainly because the I had not yet turned off digital noise reduction. Only after turning the noise reduction off was it possible to process that picture of Saturn. I was surprised that any detail from the rings showed up, but there is a thin line between the inner and outer set of rings. Thus, with improved image acquisition we should see further improvements after processing.